The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard
wealth these machines generated. In figure 8 two horses with ostentatiously studded harnesses draw a handsome carriage along a coastal road. Inside the carriage, at the very center of the image, sits a richly dressed white woman. This may have been Judge Févret’s creole mother-in-law, Mme. Motmans, who was criticized for her extravagant domestic service.62 She is not driving the vehicle, for its reins are being held by a black man riding alongside on a third horse, carrying the omnipresent whip. Two black postilions stand on the back of the carriage, wearing the same livery as the rider—white turbans with a single red feather, red jackets trimmed in white, and a white shirt.
In the left foreground, Beauvernet depicts a black couple whose naked suffering stand in stark contrast to the comfortable passenger. The man and woman wear heavy chains around their wrists. The larger of the two figures is also wearing a special iron collar, a device designed to humiliate and to isolate slaves found eating sugarcane or committing other minor violations of plantation discipline. The iron arms of the collar, with their barbed ends, stick out at a forty-five-degree angle, extending far over the man’s shoulders. The composition reinforces the marked contrast between the grandeur of the men and horses accompanying Mme. Motmans and the abject misery and animalistic treatment of the chained pair. Moreover Beauvernet depicts Mme. Motmans and her attendants as unaware of this scene of degradation. The cruelty of plantation life, Beauvernet suggests, is what keeps the wheels of commerce turning.
In 1779 the army officer Desdorides confirmed this when he described colonists’ casual attitude about cruelty in Saint-Domingue: “They do not always take care to remove the children when the slaves are punished. Those who frequently witness these punishments become hardened to it; they run as to a game to see an unhappy slave be whipped…. I have heard a mother boast of her son that at the age of ten he was strong enough to ‘cut’ a slave, that is to remove his skin with the stroke of a whip.”63 The Févret images illustrated an omnipresent reality in the slave colonies of the Greater Antilles. Violence was at the base of all the wealth and social and political power in slave societies in the region.
In his influential study of the English West Indies in the seventeenth century, Richard Dunn put forward a thesis on the social character of the West Indies that has proven very enduring. Looking at the development of the British West Indies as a student of Puritan New England and early modern European history, Dunn discounted the economic success of places like mid-seventeenth-century Barbados. He concluded that these societies were social failures, monstrous societies that were moral indictments of the process of European colonization in the Americas.64
That the colonial experience of the West Indies was socially and morally repugnant has been a strong theme in writings on the period. The Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipaul famously described them as places of mimicry where nothing original was created.65 This characterization of the West Indies as a cultural and political wasteland has, of course, been extensively critiqued, from Aimé Césaire to Kamau Braithwaite and beyond. These opponents of Naipaul’s depressing vision, however, have generally seen the Afro-Caribbean struggle against oppression as the fundamental source of Caribbean creativity, while describing the plantation as the essential colonial institution that creative Caribbean peoples struggled against. Vincent Brown has recently reinforced these arguments, mainly as a way of trying to overcome what he sees as the nihilistic assumptions embedded in the notion that Caribbean slavery was a form of “social death,” in which the slave self was irrevocably harmed through the process of being ripped away in the Atlantic slave trade from communities and familiar landscapes in Africa. He believes that slaves “must have found some way to turn the disorganization, instability, and chaos of slavery into collective forms of belonging and striving, making connections when confronted with alienation and finding dignity in the face of dishonor.”66
This literature on colonization, creolization, and cultural mimesis in the Greater Antilles is rich, confrontational, and intellectually challenging. What we want to suggest, however, is that the plantation world of the eighteenth-century Greater Antilles should not be viewed only in terms of horror.67 Death and despair were abundantly in evidence on the plantation, as the Févret map and vignettes show. That neither the white nor the black populations of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue and Jamaica could naturally reproduce their population is one more testimony to the destructive character of the plantation system. Yet the plantation system was also a place of dramatic vitality. Enslaved persons’ creative attempts to overcome or evade slavery are reason enough to see slavery’s power as both destructive and productive; in other words, enslaved people’s fear of social death was not incapacitating but generative.68 It was more than just a machine for the accumulation of wealth. We turn in the next chapter to look at some manifestations of that world in the urban life of both colonies and in the startlingly untraditional relationships between men and women of all races between the Seven Years’ War and the start of the French Revolution.
CHAPTER 3
Urban Life
The sugar plantation was the most remarkable institution in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Nevertheless, both colonies were also home to lively cities in which a much greater percentage of the population lived than was usual for British and French North America. The “generative fusion,” or creative adaptation, that Philip Morgan argues was characteristic of eighteenth-century Caribbean culture was most apparent in these dynamic urban places. It was in cities and towns that some of the transformations in race, and indeed gender, that we will be concerned with in this text were most obvious.1
Towns in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were not mere appendages to the plantation world. They were “electric transformers,” to employ Fernand Braudel’s metaphor for early modern towns, places that “increase[d] tension, accelerate[d] the rhythm of exchange and constantly recharge[d] human life.”2 Colonists in these cities found few if any of the institutions that controlled the sexual, economic, or religious behavior of European urban residents. Urban spaces were also liberating places for free and enslaved people of color, who often found more autonomy, a wider set of social relationships, and greater earning power than in rural areas. Free women, both black and white, found it easier in towns to re-create themselves as people of cultural and economic importance.
These New World towns were part of a general urbanizing trend in the eighteenth-century British and French Atlantic Worlds.3 Like provincial towns in Britain and France, they had shops and theaters, markets and commercial exchanges, and new housing developments. Yet these places were even more dynamic than their European counterparts. They had high mortality rates and a constant flux of migrants, merchants, soldiers, and slaves. The pulse of the Atlantic trade made the towns of Saint-Domingue and Jamaica into sites of continual reinvention, as new arrivals struggled to adapt to a new and sometimes bewildering environment.
Late eighteenth-century maps of Saint-Domingue’s chief cities, like René Phélipeau’s 1785 map of Cap Français and its surroundings, reveal an extraordinary vision of rectilinear order and social sophistication (Figure 9).4 Such images make it easy to remember that Port-au-Prince, Saint-Domingue’s capital, was a critical stop for Charles Marie de La Condamine’s 1735 expedition to determine the shape of the earth, and that the first hot air balloon ascension in the Americas occurred in Cap Français, the colony’s major port city. Descending closer, the image of enlightened urban sociality becomes more impressive. Cap Français had a theater that could seat fifteen hundred spectators. Cap Français was, moreover, just one of the eight towns in Saint-Domingue with theaters. Actors and musicians from Europe regularly toured the colony, performing the latest plays from Paris. Cap Français and Port-au-Prince had full-time professional troupes and orchestras. Saint-Domingue was also blessed with many booksellers, forty-four Masonic lodges, several public parks and squares, five subscription-based reading clubs, three Vauxhalls (or pleasure gardens), and a scientific academy that included corresponding members like Benjamin Franklin.5